All of Iceland's public administrations moving towards open source

All public administrations in Iceland are increasing their use of free and open source software. The country's government recently launched a one year migration project for all of its public institutions. "The goal of the project is not to migrate public institutions to free and open source software in one single year but to lay a solid foundation for such a migration which institutions can base their migration plans on", reports Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the project leader.

Examples include the three biggest public institutions in Iceland, all of the ministries, the city of Reykjavik and the National Hospital. "These are setting a good migration example", says Björgvinsson.

The project will put up a common infrastructure for migrations, he explains. Here the public administrations will document and estimate the maturity of free and open source alternatives to proprietary software. "This will foster collaboration between public institutions, IT service providers and the free and open source community in Iceland."

One of the first steps in the migration project is a series of five letters sent to all the heads of public institutions, recommending for instance the use of open standards, pointing to examples that ease the move to free and open source.

Also, a group of specialists has been formed that will monitor the project, aiming to prevent future failures. The project is also compiling a list of ongoing projects surrounding the use of free and open source software by public institutions to allow collaboration on these projects.

No restrictions for open source
"Next, we are making sure that in our public schools, the national curricula does not restrict the use of free and open source software."

The project is working on a call for tender to purchase services based on free and open source software.

"Public institutions have slowly been migrating to free software over the last four years. This school year, 2011-2012, two new secondary schools moved their systems entirely to free and open source software, bringing the count to five out of 32 schools."

A majority of the secondary schools are already running Moodle, an open source course management system. Other public bodies such as the newly founded Media commission also run entirely on free and open source software.

"The country-wide migration project will build upon their experience and hopefully pave the way for other institutions to follow."

I would be interested to hear of their experiences in using open source as a means of improving interoperability - this cannot be taken as a given. There are far too many examples of laudable open source projects turning into sprawling messes of code, without decent governance or documentation and leaving the public sector agency effectively in the hands of the single supplier who wrote the code in the first place!